Editorial: Are Franchises Killing Gaming?

Share.

How the biggest and brightest games strangle the market with both hands.

By Patrick Kolan

With Modern Warfare 2 now old news, Gears of War 3 on the horizon and Halo: Reach landing in between – you'd think gamers with a love for epics have rarely had it better. You'd be right – but what you might not realize is that these blockbuster games are arriving at the expense of other smaller, less popular titles. What's more, it's beginning to strangle the development scene with an 'only the biggest survive' mentality.

Entering a development cycle that promotes endless sequels can provide great financial reward (Activision, we're looking at you) –but it can also cause the decay of the brands involved (Tony Hawk, oh how the mighty birdman fell to Earth!) – and it also discourages original game design and risk-taking. Those two points alone are causing a slow rot in the games industry, paralleling the film industry's increasing focus on big-tent pictures.

The lingering argument is, of course, that epic games, films and franchising has almost always existed as a major component of the entertainment sphere –and money is ultimately the greatest concern of any corporation, like it or not. Artistic merit is all well and good, but that won't help you when the investors come knocking.

The Strangler Why take a risk on a new concept when it's easier (and potentially more profitable) to rest of an established brand, concept or character? This attitude is so all-consuming and pervasive right now that it rings with clockwork predictability. More and more often, we're hearing about developers opting to create franchises rather than standalone releases; we saw it happen with Mass Effect and Gears of War – to great success.

Too Human: When good trilogies (and intentions) go bad.

However, the assumption that the game warrants a trilogy is a flawed and dangerous one. You need only look at what happened to Silicon Knights' sci-fi / mythology trilogy-that-isn't, 'Too Human' - a title that, after dismal critical response and mediocre sales, would likely be far too risky a proposition to continue the franchise. So too with SEGA's 'Shenmue'; titles like these hold too much back from the story, structure and gameplay in order to provide compelling content across three games, rather than simply nailing an outstanding first game and letting the market decide if it wants a sequel.

Release Dates, Dollars and You When it comes to core business concerns, spacing out your major game releases across the fiscal year makes a lot of sense; moreover, games need enough space between them that they don't end up competing for the same dollars, which is clearly bad for sales. Companies also like to make sure there's a solid title per year – that way, the earnings don't have massive dips every other year, which drives down investor confidence and devalues the company. That's the shorthand idea about scheduling.

The flipside is, careful release date planning can also muscle out competing titles in the same release window. For example, several high profile games, such as Mass Effect 2, were scheduled to land within the same release period as Modern Warfare 2. Rather than face such stiff competition, EA opted to push Mass Effect 2 wisely back into January 2010.

Games publishers tend to cram releases of key titles into the same major holiday period. It's great, but, y'know, it sucks too.

In theory, this kind of scheduling concern should discourage cluttered release periods, but it hasn't – the market flows rule. Here's how it works.

The gaming retail sector traditionally has pretty logical peaks and troughs – generally in line with main holiday periods and global fiscal-calendar-year transition. If it seems like are April to June typically quiet periods, but suddenly January to March and September to November are booming, just take a look at the major public holidays that fall into these periods – Easter, Christmas, Hanukkah, Thanksgiving and the US school summer holiday period, not to mention the wind-up of the financial year in many countries.

Being the Bigger Dog Of course, when you're competing for those same gaming dollars as your competitor, you'll want to be the bigger dog – and beat them to the punch, too. The results mostly speak for themselves – the biggest game releases are reserved for times when people want games, and when people have money, companies are quick to part them from it – hence, a glut of big games all at once.

It's easy to look at a situation like this with a fair degree of pessimism but the reality is, games development will always have its blockbusters – and there will always be developers scrambling to emulate their success. What we, as gamers and lovers of this fine pursuit, must do is encourage more risk-taking by buying into games that don't just tick the same few generic boxes. We need to embrace creative thought, experimental gameplay (so long as it's fun, right?) and hopefully stimulate enough sales to stem the creeping tide of franchises and sequels.

Agree? Disagree? Don't care? Pour your feelings out on the digital page in the IGN Forums.